The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon #7)(44)
The mood in Imbaba that morning was more tense than usual. Riot police were roaming the alleyways and SSI men in plain clothes were surveying their surroundings from coffee shops and falafel stands. Hussein Mandali, a fourth-grade teacher at the Imbaba middle school, had seen it like this before. The security forces were about to move in for a sweep. Any man with a beard and a galabiya—or any woman in a niqab—would be arrested and thrown into the Scorpion, the dreaded facility inside Cairo’s Torah Prison complex reserved for Islamists. Everyone, regardless of sex, would spend at least a few minutes on the torture table. Pharaoh’s secret police did not concern themselves much with laws or rules of evidence. Their task was to instill fear, and they did so with ruthless efficiency.
Hussein Mandali did not wear a beard, though he did dress in the galabiya, the only garment he could afford on his pittance of a salary. Egypt’s education system, like nearly everything else in the country, was crumbling. Teachers earned nothing and students learned little. For many years the country’s twenty-five thousand public schools had been under the control of Islamists. As a result they were little more than factories that each year churned out thousands of young men and women committed to the destruction of the regime and its supporters in the West. Hussein Mandali knew this phenomenon all too well. He lectured his students daily on the rewards of jihad and martyrdom, and told them it was their sacred duty to kill Americans and Jews and topple their puppet, Hosni Mubarak. The children of Imbaba were always willing recruits. The proof of Pharaoh’s indifference to their plight was all around them.
A group of police officers was standing guard at the end of the street. They eyed Mandali suspiciously as he slipped past without a word and set out along the cacophonous boulevard overlooking the western bank of the Nile. Two minutes later he turned left onto a bridge and crossed over onto Zamalek. How different it was here, he thought. Zamalek was an island of privilege surrounded by a sea of misery, a place where the vast majority of Egypt’s population could not afford to buy a pastry or a cup of coffee. Zamalek would soon feel the wrath of Egypt’s legions of downtrodden Muslims, Mandali thought. So would the entire world.
He followed July 26 Street across the island, then wandered for a time through the quiet side streets north of the Gezira Sporting Club to make certain he wasn’t being followed. Thirty minutes after leaving Imbaba, he approached a luxury high-rise apartment house called the Ramses Towers. The tall Sudanese standing guard over the entrance was a member of the Sword of Allah. He guided Mandali into the marble lobby and instructed him to use the back staircase so that none of the other tenants would see a poor man in their gilded elevator. As a result, Mandali was heavily winded when he presented himself at the door of Apartment 2408 and knocked in the prescribed fashion: two knocks, followed by a brief pause, then three more knocks.
The door was opened a few seconds later by a man dressed in a pale gray galabiya. He admitted Mandali into a formal entrance hall, then showed him into a magnificent sitting room overlooking the Nile. Seated cross-legged on the floor, dressed in a white galabiya and a crocheted white skullcap, was an elderly man with a long gray beard. Hussein Mandali kissed the old man’s leathery cheeks and sat before him.
“You have news from the street?” asked Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq.
“Mubarak’s forces have surrounded Imbaba and have started to infiltrate the district. In other parts of the country, the army and the police are hitting us very hard. Fayoum, Minya, Asyut, and Luxor have all seen heavy raids. The situation is tense. One spark and it could explode.”
The sheikh fingered his prayer beads and looked at the other man. “Bring me a tape recorder,” he said, “and I’ll give you a spark.”
The man laid the recorder at the feet of the sheikh and switched it on. One hour later Hussein Mandali was once again picking his way through the alleys of Imbaba, this time with a cassette tape concealed inside his sock. By nightfall the sermon would be circulating through a network of popular mosques and underground jihadists cells. After that it would be in the hands of Allah. Hussein Mandali was sure of only one thing. The open sewers of Imbaba would soon be flowing red with the blood of Pharaoh’s soldiers.
22
AMSTERDAM: 9:30 A.M., MONDAY
Heleen was squat and boxy, painted chocolate brown and trimmed in red. Flower boxes lined her gunwales, and a skiff with an outboard motor bobbed at her stern. Her interior had been recently renovated; stainless-steel appliances shone in the small but sophisticated kitchen, and Scandinavian-style furniture adorned the comfortable sitting room. Three modern paintings of questionable taste had been removed from the walls and in their place hung a large-scale map of Amsterdam and several dozen surveillance photographs of a Muslim man of late middle age. A notebook computer with secure communications software stood on the glass dining-room table, and before it sat a small figure who seemed to be wearing all of his clothing at once. Gabriel pleaded with him to extinguish his cigarette. The overnight drive from Paris had left him with a splitting headache.
“If Ibrahim Fawaz is a terrorist, he certainly doesn’t act like one,” Eli Lavon said. “He doesn’t engage in anything that might be construed as a rudimentary countersurveillance, and his movements are predictable and direct.”
Gabriel looked up at the map of Amsterdam on the wall, where Ibrahim’s daily routine was represented by a thick red line. It ran from his apartment in the August Allebéplein to the West Amsterdam Islamic Community Center, then to the Ten Kate Market, and finally to the al-Hijrah Mosque. Times of arrival and departure were meticulously noted and supported by photographic evidence.